Over the last few weeks, we've been having conversations about understanding our own role in God's remaking of our world. And we've called this series, the three things that can change the world. And today I want us to finish things up, but look at the idea of graciousness as we wrap up these conversations. And one of the things we've talked about these last few weeks is Dallas Willards and his explanation of the kingdom of God as being those things that are at the boundaries of our effective will.
And how our greatest participation in this is understanding the things that we can touch and influence really are the greatest places for us to participate alongside of Jesus as he changes our world. And the very first week we talked about truthfulness and why brokenness is where falsehood lives we responded this by only focusing on what we actually have the authority and knowledge to talk about in life. And there's things that we don't have any authority or knowledge over and they seek to take over control of us by the way they control our emotions and our energy and those sorts of things. And last week we talked about Sabbath and how Sabbath serves as a mirror of striving and what it means for us to create radical trust by practicing the not doing things in our life.
Both of these ideas really just mean for us to ask the question of what does it look like to expand our vision of Jesus in our life? And then also what are the things that are trying to contract our vision of Jesus and their discipling us not in his way but in the way of the world. And today we're gonna wrap up and we're gonna talk about graciousness. We're gonna do this a little bit differently.
Our teaching text today is from book of first Samuel, Adrian, read it earlier. And it really is a parable about what it looks like to not live with graciousness as a primary outworking of life. I'm gonna talk through it a bit. The story's actually a lot bigger than what Adrian read.
And I want us to just look at three truths about graciousness and how it should be a controlling understanding in our mind and a primary action in life. I want to take a moment to still encourage you to go over to the message notes on MyFounder.life. You can get those there. You can go download the home sheet.
This is a way for us to continue the conversation from Sunday morning into the rest of our week. And in there are some kind of specific actions about becoming gracious people. But let's go back to the story from our teaching text in first Kings chapter 25. Now this story, it takes place in the in between.
David has already killed Goliath. He's a popular military commander. And he became, he started to threaten King Saul because David was more popular than he was. And so David spent a time, actually years where he was out in the wilderness.
He was actually sometimes living with their enemies, the Philistines. And he was just on his own, as he was growing up and figuring out what does it mean to be this godly leader. But it has an amazing back and forth in this story between many different personalities. Now this part of the Bible always fascinates me because it weaves the story of people together and makes us really ask that question, are they righteous or not?
Now the whole crux of this story today is about a man named Nabal and his wife Abigail. We find out in verse three that Nabal is rich, but he is harsh and bad-behaved. And his wife Abigail is described as discerning and beautiful. Her outward qualities match her inward qualities.
And here's the situation with David and his men. Now often back then, these rich men who owned a lot of animals, the ranchers or cattlemen, whatever, but they would hire people to physically protect their assets as they were grazing in the fields. I know you had your shepherds, but then sometimes you kind of have to have some other guys there with it. And at the time where you sheared the sheep, it was customary to do a couple of things.
Number one, it was customary to have a big, huge feast. And the second thing was, you paid the people that allowed you to have this feast. And then you gave them the things for them to feast as well. And it wasn't just the shepherds but the people that protected the shepherds.
It was culturally expected for you to pay them and allow them to take part in the celebration. The story almost tells it like David's men created a forced field around these herds. So imagine you were a rancher, an entire division of army rangers is encamped around you. I talk about that protection.
But to finish the story, where Adrian left off in our reading, David and his men, they go and they ask for their share, for their payment for what this is going on here. And Nabal answered by pretending to not even know who David was. He'd be making fun of David saying David was just reckless and David was running away from his master. Now at this moment, King David, and he's a little bit of a hot head throughout his life but he doesn't have one of his finer moments here.
When the word comes back to David that what his men were told by Nabal, he immediately takes 400 of his 600 trained fighting men and he tells them repeatedly, now go strap on your sword. I'm going to go strap on my sword. Let's all strap on our swords together and let's go take care of this Nabal character. You begin to make a move on him.
Now in the era on these servants come back and they don't tell Nabal exactly what happened. But they go to his wife Abigail, remember scripture said she was discerning and beautiful. And they tell her and she immediately becomes terrified and scared at this grievous error that is made, not just that her husband's not keeping up with the cultural norms, what's supposed to happen. But he did so ungraciously as well.
So she begins to assemble this feast that was almost legendary, one that would have leftovers for days and she heads out to meet King David's army. Is there a coming to her home to wipe out every single person that lives there? And she comes to David, she falls down her face, she begins like she confessing to him all these things. And in the conversation back and forth between these servants and Abigail, when she was finding out about the situation, his own servant subscribed him as worthless.
You know, he's a purpents, this devoid of purpose and that he has no cultural or no civic value, that not only was Nabal unfit, but that he almost shouldn't even be existing. Now in this moment when Abigail and David meet, no Abigail's graciousness stops David in his tracks. Now he even thanks her for realizing her graciousness and her ability to discern situations and her ability to realize the gravity, the whole situation, it stopped David from going and killing all this entire household. Like it stopped multiple things from happening and David even realizes this and thanks her for just being that person in the moment to stop bad things from happening.
Now meanwhile, back at the house, Nabal and his friends are feasting with a level of gluttony and debauchery that's worthy of Game of Thrones. No, when Abigail gets back from even David, he's so drunk that she doesn't even tell him what's going on. She waits for him to sleep it off. And the next morning she wakes him up and she says, hey listen, let me tell you about what almost happened and what I had to do to fix the situation.
Now scripture tells us that upon hearing this Nabal was so terrified that his heart stopped and it took him 10 days to die. The dude literally stroked out from realizing what his wife stopped from happening. Now once Nabal died, David heard all of this. He actually calls out and offers his hand in marriage to Abigail and she becomes part of household.
One commentator even said this, that she shared in the fortunes of David. Now Abigail and Nabal, this is a parable. It's a story but it's a deeper meaning in the way that it's told to us. They stand in pictures of people who are either gracious and generous in the value that they bring to others or someone who's completely ungracious and ungenerous and they have nothing of worth to share to other people.
So there's three things I want to think about this morning is we look at this story of graciousness and kind of the perils of being an ungracious person. Now I want to think about how that allows us to change things around us. The first thing is this, graciousness is tied to experiencing the presence of God. Last week we talked about Genesis 126, and said, so let us make God in our own image.
Now listen to this, what have we lost in life because sin came into this world? What did we lose in the fall? We lost perfection. We now have pain in our life.
We have to work, we have to strive, we have to fight to have what we need, to be provided for sin to look so many things away from us. But also think about this, what have we retained? I think this is the thing there, that through Jesus Christ, we are given the ability to realign our personal character not just two good things, but to do so in a way that resembles this image that we were created in. We can look at characteristics like graciousness is lying dormant in our life until the forgiveness of our sins and this reunification back to the Father through Jesus Christ.
And they're now unlocked by the Holy Spirit. Before Jesus, I hate to tell you, you can't be gracious. You can pretend to, you can feign at it, but Jesus unlocks this holy ability that God still has us able to function in his own image. So on 145, 839 says this, the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding instead fast love.
The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made. Graciousness means to have a favor that you're willing to share with others. It's nearly always used in scripture in context with mercy. It's the most common witness to the character of God.
We find the book of Psalms. The Father is predisposed to respond with mercy to this world. That's who he is. It's not something he decided to do, it's who he is.
And if this is so much of who God is, then we can't engage with the presence of God in a way that we individually begin to process and to be affected by how this is offered to us uniquely to everyone. And we won't be able to be in the presence of God without graciousness and generosity and gratitude and all of these things being a personal after effect. If you struggle with graciousness, I imagine that you'll be struggling with the reality of the presence of God in your life. And that leads us to our next idea, is this our outward lack of graciousness will reveal the character of our heart.
Nabal's possessions were named even before he was mentioned. The stuff he had was the first thing people talked about, but what's so funny is we didn't actually get his name. Nabal is just the Hebrew word for fool. Remember how his men called him worthless?
Like he was so worthless, he doesn't even deserve to be named in this story. He enters into this story with his possessions as the definition of who he is, and he dies with his possessions as the definition of who he is. His lack of graciousness just simply doesn't jive with the dwelling of the presence of God. Nabal does whatever he wants, no matter whom it affects, he is a completely autonomous individual in this story.
Now the primary teaching of Jesus is for those who become at least will become the greatest. A close cousin of this teaching, or these multiple parables in with this phrase here that to much has been given, much is expected. If you've been around foundry for any length of time, you know that that teaching of Jesus just stands out in my mind is the question that I always ask myself when I respond with my actions. And here's the thing, friends, this isn't just an ethical decision of being a nice person, or being a person that shares.
Instead, graciousness is our realization that we are taking on the character of God as we paray for his kingdom to increase. Now these are things of obedience that we are going to have to respond to daily in an almost every situation in life. And we can't cheat our way through this. Mark 422 says this, what his secret will be made known.
The things in your life, the things in your heart that you want to hide from everyone else will be made known. Now some of them will be made known in eternity, judgment with these things are shared. But I hate to tell you, but much more frequently, we reveal the secret character and contents of our hearts by our outward actions. And we stumble through life and baresing ourselves and sometimes spreading destruction around us instead of realizing the power of repentance and the tough work that Jesus does to make us holy.
The last thing is this, our expression of graciousness is in direct correlation to our own understanding of how we have received and acted in the grace that God has given us. Now in my own life, I've realized so many times that we mirror what we have experienced in the past. The thing that we think is normal is the thing that we will do. And if we haven't done the work to comprehend our own sin, to comprehend our own need for Jesus, this means that our own need, we won't comprehend our own need and our own experience of God acting graciously towards us.
We're going to be dealing with a function only. We're going to have all this knowledge without having any power. And that means we're thinking about these things and doing these things that are much more dangerous than us just not having any awareness of the graciousness of God and living in simple ignorance. Now we become what we worship.
And if we are trying to live the Christian life without any personal experience and testimony to the graciousness of God, we're going to be doing false things. Richard Loveless says this, men and women cannot know themselves until they know the reality of the God who made them. And once they know the holy God, their own sins appear so grievous that they cannot rest until they have fully appropriated Christ. We can't change anything unless we've allowed ourselves to first be changed.
Now we're the church has lost significant ground in recent years is because we've forgotten that the way that God deals with us personally is the way that we are called to deal with other people. And I think one of the reasons that we have forgotten this is we haven't experienced it. We have a head relationship with Jesus without a heart relationship with Jesus and that's faulty. We started off the series talking about what we can do to change the world around us and by us realizing as followers of Jesus, by focusing on the things that we can touch ourselves because let's be honest, what affects us the most?
The things far away or the things closest to us? Now think about how we have allowed things with no agency over us at all to instead take over our mind to work the list things, things with no merit, things with no value, things that don't actually change. Living in graciousness redefines our relationship with what is actually bound in time. It is us saying this is what God has done for me and in turn, this is what I absolutely have to do now.
Graciousness pulls us out of a broken world and inserts us into the economy of the kingdom. So let's pull this naval story down and everything we've talked about and dig into our own lives a little bit. Cause this is what I think we get to the problem we find with graciousness. It really is what naval was saying to David.
What do other people not deserve? Think about that. How many times have you encountered a person, encountered a situation, encountered a group of people or reality and simply said, you know, they don't deserve those things. They don't deserve the things that I have.
They don't deserve to live the way I live. They don't deserve the blessings I have or the relationships I have or the power that I have or anything like that. They don't deserve this, but I do. If we really get honest with that question, what we find out is at some point in time in our life, we never found the validation for what we had to do.
And we want other people to enter into the same heartbreak and the same trials that we did. But the only problem is that's not that person's story. It's your story, it's our story, it's my story. Or maybe you're looking at your situation in life where you feel like, you know, things haven't been that gracious to you, so therefore you don't have to be gracious to other people as well.
Because it hasn't worked out. Well, it won't happen earlier this week. I found this out today when I was reading about this, a bunch of people on Reddit hatched a plan to take down the stock market because they were worried their favorite video game retabler was going to go away. Now, how many times do we not have graciousness?
Instead, we begin enacting revenge. We don't feel graciousness in our lives, so therefore we must be vengeful on those that we interpret have seen graciousness. This exact same story David found himself fit. He was feeling hurt.
He was feeling cast aside. And his first emotion was to strap on his sword and go show Nabal who was really in charge. And then he was encountered by Abigail, a person who's inside matched their outsides. All of this we've been talking about these last few weeks is just that.
If we can assume that God made us in his image, if we can assume that Jesus saved us and restored us and broke our bondage ascend, then the greatest thing that we can do in our life is for our inside to match our outside. Imagine how culturally devastating it would be for people to begin taking personal responsibility for their own part in the breaking of this world, to seek forgiveness, to allow God to change them, and then to begin responding and graciousness to this world and to those things they can touch, the people around them at the degree that they have interpreted and processed God's graciousness in their life. Through the tough internal work, we go through our own need of mercy and how it's been given to us. And then we begin offering that same mercy and measure of how we've experienced it and how we've understood it personally.
So this is my challenge. Go grab the home sheet. Take the time to process through your own experiences of graciousness in life. So begin letting Jesus ask you the tough questions about how you've handled things on your own.
Now you're banking on knowledge, to be the thing for eternity or your own personal experience. How well your insides match your outsides. Those are the actions that can truly change this world. Let's pray together.
God, we come to you this morning or we've talked about these things for several weeks. We've got my prayer right now is for us just to have eyes that see not your whole huge big world around us, but God, the world that you have given us, the world that you have made us and called us to influence. God, how you have let us see things that we can touch and see things we can change. What I think back to what you told Abraham said, hey, as far as your eyes can see, I'm giving all these things to you or we realize that you say the exact same thing to us, that for everything we can see it has been given to us.
And God, let us not act like navel and ungraciousness and ungenerosity, but instead to realize that we've been given the beautiful gift of cooperating with you in the remaking of our world God. I pray for us to understand how you've been gracious, God. For us to understand our sin and how that stops us from being with you. God, how Jesus has fixed that for us.
God, let us be people whose inside matches their outside. And let me pray, amen.